A Warren woman faces child abuse and torture charges for actions toward her 3-year-old son that an assistant prosecutor described as “barbaric.”

Charveta Alecia Jackson, 24, is accused of pressing a hot fork or similar pronged object against the boy’s skin, causing second-degree burns.

During a preliminary hearing Thursday in 37th District Court, St. John Macomb-Oakland Hospital emergency room physician Dr. Vito Rocco testified that he was told by Jackson’s aunt last Sept. 2 that the boy suffered scratches. What he viewed was much different: burns to the boy’s back, chest, a shoulder, a thigh and groin area, some with a contiguous pattern resembling tines from a fork and other marks indicating he may have tried to pull away after feeling pain.

The fork would have been pressed against flesh for at least a one minute, Rocco said during the hearing before Judge Michael Chupa.

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The doctor said the aunt was “markedly upset” but the accused mother seemed “unaffected” while the boy sat in a diaper on a hospital gurney. Jackson claimed her son had been staying with a cousin until six days earlier and that she had not noticed the injuries, said Rocco, adding that some of the burns were more than a week old, but others had occurred just a few days before the boy was brought to the hospital.

When Rocco told the women that he suspected the boy had been abused, Jackson had little reaction.

“She wasn’t really fazed,” the emergency room doctor said.

After Jackson was arrested, a judge last November ordered the Warren mother undergo an evaluation at the Center for Forensic Psychiatry to determine whether she was insane at the time of the inflicted injuries and if she was mentally competent to stand trial. After the mental evaluation, she was deemed competent and culpable for her alleged actions.

Vicki Walsh, the Macomb County assistant prosecutor on the case, said Thursday that Jackson gave a written confession to Warren police.

Defense attorney Stanley Szot unsuccessfully tried to convince the judge that the torture charge did not fit Jackson’s actions, saying it applied more to kidnapping than parental custody of a small child.

In addition to the torture charge, Chupa ruled that testimony and pictures of the boy’s injuries were sufficient for Jackson to be bound over to Macomb County Circuit Court for trial on one count of first-degree child abuse. Both offenses are punishable by any number of years in prison, up to life.

“I don’t doubt for one second this child was in extreme distress,” Chupa said.

Szot also requested a reduction of the $500,000 bond that has kept Jackson incarcerated since last summer, saying that she has no criminal record, that her family is supportive of her and that one of her two former part-time employers is willing to allow her to return to work.

But Walsh vehemently opposed the suggestion of lower bail.

“She’s a risk to the community. She’s a risk to herself,” the assistant prosecutor said. “To conceive someone would do this to their child is barbaric.”

Chupa denied Szot’s request.

An arraignment in circuit court, at which point the formal charges are merely repeated, is scheduled for June 16.